From the “Small Self” to the “Greater Self”: A Spiritual Journey
Jia Fangzhou
Like many women artists, Dai Ying’s artistic beginnings lie in presenting her individual experience as a woman. This autobiographical mode of expression has been a common characteristic of Chinese women artists since the 1990s. For Dai Ying’s generation of young artists, their creative practices also prominently feature a gendered perspective—yet they do not regard this perspective as limiting. Rather, they see it as a unique artistic resource. Their works often explore issues such as gender, power, and identity through depictions of the female body. Exaggerated forms and bold colors are frequently used to reveal the multiple predicaments women face in contemporary society. Dai Ying follows these principles not only in her two-dimensional works but also expands them through her multi-media experimentation, injecting new vitality into Chinese contemporary art and offering important insights on the social engagement that such art should embody.
In Dai Ying’s autobiographical pieces, her abstract forms often take the shape of ever-expanding and transforming rings—visual metaphors rendered in intense, seductive colors full of tension. Their predominant tone is one of self-confidence, self-appreciation, and even self-display. At times, darker palettes appear, expressing sudden feelings of confusion or entanglement that arise from within.
Yet in the broader arc of her artistic development, Dai Ying has not confined herself to the autobiographical framework of female identity. Instead, she gradually expands her vision to the struggles of ordinary people and the living conditions of those at society’s margins. This shift—from “departure from the self” to “humanistic concern”—not only reflects the widening scope of her artistic vision but also reveals the sense of social responsibility expected of a contemporary artist. This movement from personal experience and gendered perspectives toward a broader concern for humanity marks a passage from the “small self” to the “greater self,” and it is precisely this transformation that has left a deep impression on me.
With the sensitivity and compassion characteristic of an artist, she consciously turns her attention to significant social events unfolding around her, contemplating and presenting them through artistic means. This marks a substantial leap in her practice—from self-perception to an awareness of the environment in which she lives—constituting a spiritual journey of expanding humanistic consciousness. Thus, Dai Ying’s work is not only an expression of female individual experience but also a profound reflection on contemporary social issues. Through considering human fate and existential struggle, her work transcends boundaries of gender and culture, becoming a bridge connecting the individual with society and the self with the environment.
Her installation Home was created after witnessing a heartrending social incident. She visited the site of a demolished neighborhood daily, documenting the entire process with her camera and collecting discarded household objects and debris: plastic bags in various colors, woven sacks, broken bricks and tiles, an abandoned baby stroller, and even a children’s toy still playing “Happy Birthday” amid the rubble. When she transformed the colorful plastic bags into a dazzling floral matrix, this illusory beauty—set against the backdrop of a desolate ruin—seemed to add a trace of warmth to an otherwise hollowed-out scene. Particularly striking is that, even in a work charged with critique, one still senses the maternal sentiment inherent in her emotional core as a woman: the toy still singing “Happy Birthday,” the abandoned stroller—objects that inevitably prompt viewers to ask: Where is the baby? Where is the mother? Where have they gone? Are they safe? Evidently, within Dai Ying’s broader humanistic concern, maternal compassion is its underlying tone.
In 2020, at her solo exhibition A Memorial for Forgetting at Today Art Museum, she exhibited works such as Attendance Record and Maintain Dignity Always. The overarching theme of these pieces is empathy for vulnerable individuals unable to protect themselves—a desire to speak on their behalf with deep humanitarian feeling. In particular, Maintain Dignity Always was created by inviting migrant workers to write their own statements, directly voicing the inner struggles and demands of those routinely overlooked.
In 2023, Dai Ying held the exhibition No Dust to Be Wiped at Beijing’s Huguo Guanyin Temple. She collected over one hundred jars of dust from across China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), arranging the containers of various shapes and sizes across the floor. Through a ritualized performative process, she brought forth the Zen Buddhist notions of “emptiness” and “nothingness”: “Bodhi originally has no tree, the bright mirror also has no stand.
Originally there is not one thing—where could dust alight?” In her contemplation of emptiness and impermanence, she interprets Eastern aesthetics through performance, bridging traditional aesthetics and contemporary sensibility while reflecting on cultural identity amid globalization.
At the Fourth New Expressionism Contemporary Chinese Art Invitational Exhibition in Xi’an last year, Dai Ying once again addressed the relationship between her art and “locality” with her work A Sod-Turning Ceremony. Xi’an, a capital of thirteen dynasties, is renowned for its archaeological finds. Dai Ying used local soil along with the Luoyang shovel, a specialized tool for excavating cultural relics, to construct her installation. This creation, rooted in site-specific characteristics, exemplifies a key trait of contemporary artistic practice. As a Chinese contemporary artist, Dai Ying’s work constantly navigates the tensions between local and traditional, global and modern. While her work embodies the subtlety and lyricism of Eastern aesthetics, it also adopts multidimensional visual languages that engage in international artistic dialogue. This cultural self-awareness gives her work both recognizability in global exhibitions and significance as an example of Chinese contemporary art in a global context.
For these reasons, Dai Ying has become increasingly active and recognized within the international art world. In recent years, her solo and group exhibitions in New York, Berlin, and other cities have brought her work into the view of mainstream Western art institutions, making the future development of her artistic career full of promise.
2025, Beijing
